With respect to your doctor sugar pill reference, if someone twirled
a rubber chicken over my head and it me feel better, I’d be cool with it.
Same goes with power cords. If the listener thinks (perceived bias can always creep in, we’re human) it sounds better to them so be it. Good power cords have the advantage of better quality plugs and shielding, but in essence should never change the AC input to a point where they are changing the sound. Power cords are not vacuum tubes.
Spending a couple hundred dollars on a good quality cord is fine, but spending thousands wouldn’t make much sense to me.
Question is, how many of those years of established (I’m not talking ASR) electrical research are related to audio and hearing? Just saying something without actual evidence of the research is tantamount to others relating their subjective experiences. I can sit here and say science has determined all we need to know about the big bang, but that wouldn’t be true, would it, otherwise why would scientists keep looking?
Now, back to listening to some music via my rubber chickens…
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
750
You’re less skeptical than I am. “Experiencing” means that something is actually happening, externally. Maybe it’s all in their minds, a complete auditory hallucination.
Well, one could point to opportunity costs, but I tend to agree with you. After all, a good psychiatrist costs $200/hour and up. Counseling to cure oneself of these auditory hallucinations could easily cost more than $10K.
There is no research into whether power cables affect hearing, because there’s no evidence to suggest that fancy cables can have any effect on an electrical system that could impact on what comes out of a speaker. This fact precludes the need for further research.
As an aside, there’s a great quote (origin disputed) that goes as follows:
" If the Human Brain Were So Simple That We Could Understand It, We Would Be So Simple That We Couldn’t"
Power cords, on the other hand, are many orders of magnitude simpler.
Given those two propositions, which is more likely - yet to be discovered science, or some sort of cognitive effect?
No, it isn’t. The moon landings took place. The world is round rather than flat. Do I need to cite specific evidence or can we take it as read that both statements are true? What plenty of people have tried to point out in this thread that the status of knowledge regarding electrical systems has the same epistemological status as my initial two statements.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
David, I am not denying that cognitive bias is applicable in this context, obviously it applies in many instances. Its part of the being human as you point out. The problem is your unequivocal and steadfast clinging to the fact that bias apply to any and all audiophiles, professional reviewers, and any reports of listeners that experienced changes to the tonal balance of their systems when auditioning power cables You cannot come to such a conclusion, it is illogical. At most 20% of such reports should be due to bias, NOT 100%
Why is it illogical? If one person can experience cognitive bias then surely two can. And if two people, why not ten, or several thousand? And why should 20% be due to bias? Why not 5%, or 42%, or all of them?
There are countless examples of people believing things, or not believing things, as a consequence of cognitive bias, and it’s easy to see why it’s such a problem in audiophile circles given the huge number of really expensive bits of stuff that are created and marketed with the stated aim of improving the sound of our systems. Small bits of wood to put in our listening rooms, hugely expensive ethernet and usb cables, cable lifters, devices to reclock and reduce jitter in the asynchronous transmission of data. I could go on, but you get the idea. All of these things are marketed by the companies that produce them. They’re reviewed by people who make money from reviewing them. And then, people buy them with the promise that they will improve the SQ of their systems.
The importance of cognitive bias in the way we perceive the world can’t be understated. So yes, in this instance - can power cables make a difference to sound quality? - I’m happy to remain unequivocal and steadfast and state that 100% of the reports are a consequence of something other than the cable itself.
If you’re unhappy about that, set up a properly controlled double-blind test and prove that you’re right, … or wrong.
EDIT: Scrap my first comments about percentages. If you want to look at this issue logically, either everyone is hearing an effect that’s caused by the power cable (because that’s a thing that can happen), or none of them are (because that’s not a thing that can happen). There’s no in between.
And just to repeat, in case this got lost in the mix again, nobody is disputing that people do hear a difference.
1 Like
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
755
These double-blind tests strike me as not a good way to settle the question. Why not play the same thing through different power cables, record each play (using sufficiently revealing microphones, of course), and compare the recordings mechanically (that is, with a computer)? That way, we’ve got evidence which can be examined, instead of the unseeable and inexplicable sensory apparatus of double-blind test subjects.
The answer is simple…common sense, because you and I are speculating, you can only apply common sense, and common sense dictate that it cannot be all. It really is that simple. You actually have the gall to suggest that over a period of 30 years , all experiences were actually not real. Come on, Really!!
There isn’t anything special about “audio” that would require different research. It is subject to all of the same forces and principles as any other electrical system.
Tons of research have been done in both the audio world and the world of hearing—how you can not know this is baffling. Audiology is an entire field devoted to the study of hearing…
Grasping at hyper-specific straws is just a way to try to deny a greater truth. You’re asking people to defend established science because you just don’t want to admit that your position is untenable.
If you know that H2SO4 is caustic, are you going to argue that it might not be when you’re wearing striped socks, just because nobody has ever tested it while wearing striped socks?
I’m sure there must be a pithy quote somewhere about the perils of relying on common sense
Did you read the last sentence of my previous post? Nobody is disputing that the experiences aren’t real, it’s the source of that reality that’s at issue. It really is that simple.
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
760
I don’t find it that outlandish. People are still reporting seeing UFOs, after all. And ghosts!
Acoustic measurement will not work for this purpose. It is not sufficiently precise/repeatable. Run to run variations among the trials will be inevitable – even when the same cable is tested twice. That will lead to dubious conclusions that the experimental error inherent to the measurements actually is the result of cable differences.
See a similar previous experiment and my criticism of its methodology.
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
766
You know, this could all be settled quite easily, if the true believers are determined to win this argument. After all, the skeptics here are not hard-core; we simply believe that given the body of well-understood electrical knowledge, and in the light of a reasonable alternative explanation – auditory hallucinations, basically – that it’s much more likely that power cables cannot subtly influence the sound of an audio stack. No one denies that gross effects are possible; silence, for instance, or drop-outs caused by faulty cable connections, or even ground loops propagated via the ground terminal of the cable. It’s the subtle effects that are in doubt. And that’s easy to resolve.
But it will take some money. You need to gather some cables, a representative sample, some believably disinterested observers, and rent a recording studio for half a day. Record the same music or test tones over different cables, and show the differences in the recordings. Evidence is king!
Update: Ah, Andrew chimes in above to disabuse me of my naive belief in direct experimentation! Apparently still not easy to resolve!
